I'm test-infected and that's why one of my first exciting Scala discoveries was ScalaTest

Life and complacency took me away from my first 'love'.

I'm not talking about the early adopters writing obscure code here -- that can probably be solved with a suitable style guide. I just debugged my way through an example that should have been trivial but I only figured out because:

In order for HTML5 to become the true user interface technology of the future, servers must be able to transparently push data to clients. People have been trying to do this for a long time, and WebSockets look like they will solve the problem once and for all.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a little quiz to my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter. No one managed to figure out what the code does without running it. Some managed to explain the result once they had run it. Perfect quiz for weeding out those job applicants you don't like. Especially in the banking industry. Enough hints :-)

My friend James Ward was explaining some of the struggles he had learning Scala, in particular partial functions.

I'm a big Amazon fan, and a Prime account is great when you live in the boonies. I've also become a big Kindle fan -- but I've just discovered that I'm only a fan of the old design: the amazing thin, light, black-and-white book-reader-only kindles.

I've been wanting to play with an Arduino for awhile, but there are so many (which is great, but confusing for the first-timer).

My passion is implementing programming languages. While the languages I have created (e.g. Cat and Heron) haven't exploded in popularity, I have learned a few things along the way and I've decided to share some of it back with the community.

The folks at CERN did a great job of capturing my presentation there; you can see the whole thing online.

Visiting the ALBA Synchrotron in Barcelona and speaking at the ICALEPCS conference of people who program machines like this, I was struck by how much Python is used to run these systems.

I posted this on Reinventing-Business.com because it seemed more appropriate, but there are some items that might be of interest to readers here (especially the observations about the Stockholm user groups)

Over a career, good programmers spend much more of their time in professional education than in their college classes. Much of this professional training is tied up with certification programs. But good education needs feedback — all the way to the defining charters of the trainers and their organizations.

My JavaOne day three was just sessions. And the concert! But the sessions were good ones.

Day Two at JavaOne brought a few more interesting announcements.